We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

“False traitor! false clerk!” quod he

One can sympathise with Professor Terry Eagleton’s view that A C Grayling’s private university is odious. All decent folk were shocked when Professor Grayling announced that he was leaving the state education system. If he wasn’t going to stick with it, say I, he shouldn’t have married it in the first place.

Yes, it must be the case that Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Niall Fergusson and the rest of this bunch who want to set up a private university all solemnly vowed to cleave unto to the Russell Group of Universities, forsaking all others, til death did them part. Nothing else – except possibly the reintroduction, unnoticed by me, of the grand old tradition that all the Clerkes of Oxenforde be obliged to take Holy Orders – explains the outrage in the Guardian comments about them slipping off to canoodle with the proposed New College of the Humanities. Listen to poor cuckolded Eagleton’s reaction to the idea of the floozy-college: he speaks of “the nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit.”

A disgustingly elitist university. Disgusting, I calls it. Well, we both do.

I lied above. I think this is a splendid development. It is sure to be a learning experience all round. First, a learning experience for the students, at a very reasonable eighteen grand per annum – peanuts compared to the American colleges. Second, a learning experience for Eagleton and all his fellow toilers in the loyal universities. A bit of competition will buck them up. Thirdly it might even be a learning experience for Professors Grayling, Dawkins, Ferguson, Colley, and Cannadine. The first two named are hard atheists and soft socialists and have been very much given to denouncing the divisiveness of faith schools and demanding that any institution in receipt of state money be obliged to stick to the state line. (I have to admit that in a backhanded way Grayling and Dawkins have a point: the stupidest thing the religious schools, which are older, often far older, than state education, ever did was to let themselves be talked into taking the government coin. He who pays the piper calls the tune, fools. In mitigation, the smooth, reasonable bureaucrats who promised that the religious schools’ distinctive character would of course be preserved within the state system were difficult men to disbelieve.) Anyway, I think the New Collegians might be about to rediscover the concepts of freedom of association … freedom of schools to select their pupils as they see fit … freedom to set their own syllabus … oh, and freedom to educate for profit.

16 comments to “False traitor! false clerk!” quod he

  • Hugo

    “a very reasonable eighteen grand per annum”

    I disagree.

    “There are two main attractions of a university a) you are surrounded by like-minded people who are doing interesting things and b) you are disciplined to keep learning or producing. Note that neither of these benefits intrinsically costs money. The main weakness of the modern elite university is the extraordinary cost.”
    ( http://intellectual-detox.com/hackertopia-a-better-city/ )

    Eighteen grand is still far too expensive. Not that I have anything against this new university — it’s a start, making the best of this unfree market, and I salute it. But University in a free market could be done much, much cheaper.

  • 'Nuke' Gray

    The idea will never catch on, of course. Education and the state go together like fish and bicycles. Everyone knows that!

  • Eric

    It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything as haughty as it is ignorant. This man is a professor? One begins to see the draw of any system that doesn’t include him.

  • Chris Cooper

    We’ve already got at least one private university in the University of Buckingham. It very rarely gets mentioned in the MSM, so it must be doing something right. Does anyone know what effect it’s having/had in the academic world?

  • the last toryboy

    Not sure how 12-13 hours a week is “intense”, when I was reading chemistry at humble Exeter Uni it was a 35 hour week when you included the lab time.

  • Johnathan Pearce

    Freedom: it is contagious, isn’t it?

    The fact that an unrepentant Marxist like Eagleton is in a tizz only adds to the delight.

  • Andrew Duffin

    What we really want to see is Oxford or Cambridge (or both, even better) telling the State where to shove it, but this is a good start anyway.

    And as someone said, if it offends the leftists, it’s even better.

  • Midwesterner

    Sadly, at least in the US, universities and colleges didn’t need to be taking government money to get in trouble. The states came into higher education with heavily subsidized state university systems and drove all but the most elite private colleges bankrupt.

    … in 1904. Van Hise declared that he would “never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family in the state.”

    I think the destruction of all of the schools that wouldn’t toe the progressive line was both intentional and premeditated.

  • Steven Rockwell

    The states came into higher education with heavily subsidized state university systems and drove all but the most elite private colleges bankrupt.

    At least in the case of the land grant university government got involved to:
    A) make sure that reaserch was done in agriculture, science, and engineering (areas the private schools like Harvard, Yale, and Columbia weren’t as interested in as the nation needed them to be
    B) Make sure that information was desiminated to the farmers and manufacturing interests in the form of the extension agent (something else the good schools didn’t care about)
    C) Make sure some education was available to the citizens that couldn’t afford to send their kids to the good schools.

    Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like the current state school education system at all, but I think the reasoning behind it was solid. I mean, if there is something that needs done and the private interests don’t care, does it becomes a legitimate government issue then, especially when we’re talking about techniques for feeding the nation or building an infrastructure for our economy? I think the states went into the education with the best of intentions and needs reformed, but getting the state out of the university system entirely is real low on my wish list.

  • hovis

    I don’t care whether a university is elitist or not – surely that’s one thing they should be intellectually at least. The beef I have with Grayling and his ilk are they are just a bunch of hubristic media whores, who think that face time on screen a good academic makes. The only one I would personally give time to would be Fergusson, but I very much doubt the “quality” of the education will be up to much – are the big names really going to teach there very much? Seems a exercise in Narcissm for all involved.

  • @Hugo: Glad to see I’m not the only person here who reads Devin Finbarr.

  • I mean, if there is something that needs done and the private interests don’t care, does it becomes a legitimate government issue then, especially when we’re talking about techniques for feeding the nation or building an infrastructure for our economy?

    No, it doesn’t.

  • Steven Rockwell

    What constitutes a legitimate goverment role then?

  • I may not be the right person to ask, Steven, but if I pretend to be a minarchist for the moment (which is not difficult), I’d say protecting people’s lives and property against predators and natural disasters and plagues. Full stop.

  • Laird

    I agree with Alisa. If something “needs done” the market (i.e., some individual desiring to make a profit) will do it. If not, the error is not in “the market” but rather in your assessment of the thing that you think “needs done”. Any time the government intervenes in an economic activity it distorts the markets, by which I mean it diverts capital flows and human activity into sub-optimal uses. (Usually for the immediate benefit of favored persons.)

    Your land grant colleges might have stimulated useful research into agriculture and engineering, but at what cost? To what other, even more productive, uses would those resources have been applied if governments hadn’t diverted them into things politicians thought “needed done”? We’ll never know, but I can guarantee that there was a net loss to society on the trade. (Go back and read your Bastiat again if you need a reminder about what is “seen and not seen”.)

  • Sigivald

    Steven Rockwell asked: What constitutes a legitimate goverment role then?

    Enforcement of contracts, defense from external aggression (ie, national defense), and policing (internal defense against criminal aggression).

    Those are the three definitely-justified government roles according to standard libertarian theory.

    Those are, now, a base agreement*, not an agreed maximum, but it sure becomes tricky to defend more if you take the core maxims seriously.

    (* Indeed, even maximum-government types agree that the State has those roles. The difference being that they think the State has/should have plenary power.)

    (Those maxims being, roughly:

    1) that the justified State exists to preserve that civil order and enforcement of agreement necessary to preserve a civil state.

    2) that the State’s exactions to those ends, being done with force and in the end at gunpoint and with threat of death, should be the minimum needed to achieve that necessary goal, and thus by extension that additional goals or objectives that “would be nice” but are not strictly necessary to civil survival are not to be added just because someone might like them, because, well, see the first sentence of this point.

    [If we take the coercive and violent nature of enforced taxation seriously, we stop spending millions on poetry exhibitions using someone else’s money.]

    3) Related to #2, that the produce of one’s labor, (as freely contracted with others) is rightfully one’s own, rather than the State’s, to rearrange as the State decides “for your own good”, or “for the greater good”. In other words, “someone else’s benefit is not my obligation” (unless I choose to make it so).

    4) Also related to #2, there may be additional places where State action is justified due to basic maintenance of civil order beyond policing*, or due to unavoidable free-rider problems related to those necessaries**.

    * cf. Hayek’s belief that a basic “social safety net” – far less extensive than that now in place – might be necessary simply to prevent mass riots or Communist agitation of a successful sort.

    ** cf. Nozick’s explication of why the police power is identical to having a State, and leads inexorably to one, in A/S/U.)